Favorite Posts

As I rediscover them, I'll be posting some of my favorite posts here. As I try to wean myself from daily posts now and then, this is a good place to find something good from the past. I try to write these posts so they don't really have a sell-by date. Some events may be old, but the ideas should still be pertinent.

Putting Things Into Perspective
In our day-to-day lives, it's easy to get narrowly focused. These posts are a few examples where I take something in the news or that I bump into and put it into a larger context.

How Much Are Polar Bears Worth As A Species?
In this post, I challenge the governor's conclusion that hundreds of millions that it will cost the state if the polar bear is designated endangered. I challenge the cost he gives as well as the value of the polar bear.

Damn This World Is Complicated Part III: Kelp Flies and Gulls
This is the third of three posts that started with a bird watching tour to see snowy plovers that got more complicated by looking at their food - beach hoppers and kelp flies and the interactions amongst them all. The second post - on beach hoppers - has the most hits. I've linked the other two posts in this one.

Euphemism Alert!! What The Hell Is "Lack of Situational Awareness"? - A reader recently went to this page that I'd forgotten about. I think it fits in this category because it tries to brush aside the facade of euphemism and show what Alyeska Pipeline folks were not saying. As I reread it seven years later, I noticed a reference to Stratfor. This Atlantic article does to Stratfor what I was doing to 'lack of situational awareness.' I suspect some might say this belongs in the Being Playful category. [Added Oct 23, 2017]

Who is Mr. Doob?
An elusive Barcelona native who created Google Gravity and other playful takes. His design work combined with his programming work pushes the limits of what can be done with websites.

Nobody Here, Digital Genius
I love this website. If I knew a lot more about how to use code, I'd be doing stuff like this. I've gotten used to the format of Blogspot, but sometimes I want to break out and use the whole screen and have things move and connect visually. Like this site.

Goodbye Ruth Marx - May 26, 1913 - September 1, 2015
I met Ruth Marx a few months before her 100th birthday. I had my granddaughter - who was born 100 years after Ruth Marx was born - with me. This post includes the video I took of Mrs. Marx the first time we met. If you want to feel good, watch.

Being Playful
I should be doing more of this, but snark is perhaps my easiest form of humor and I want this blog to practice respect and focus on ideas. Snark tends to make the targets feel belittled. It sneaks out too often as it is.

Palin Announces Conversion - This was my April 1 post in 2010. I try to let loose a bit every April Fool's Day, and I think this one was the best. Click on the Vogue cover.

Writing The Blog
I started blogging to find out what blogging was all about. Thus it was natural to have a lot of posts about what I was learning about blogging. I do much less of that now and when I do it's usually more about writing and why I write the way I do.

Meandering - I was reading David Copperfield and I decided to use Dickens' defense of meandering as a justification of my own tendency to wander a bit.

Who Am I? Who Are You? - This post is also linked in the What Is This Blog About? page. It explains why I'm reluctant to use the buzz words to define myself. But the section on ethnographer Clifford Geerz helps explain the importance of meandering.

Victor Lebow's Complete Original 1955 Article. This is one of the most satisfying posts. I'd happened on the video "The Story of Stuff" just after it was posted and commented about the quote by Victor Lebow. Something didn't seem right. I did more research and found the article the quote was from and posted it and my interpretation. It's got lots of comments.

Joe Miller: "If East Germany Could, We Could." This post went most viral, getting 7,000 or so hits in a couple of days and it was cited widely including Der Spiegel. TPM, Huffington Post, Poitico, CrooksandLians, Washington Post, even the Guardian. It's got the audio of Senate candidate Joe Miller saying that if East Germany could build a wall, so could we. Lot's of comments, pointed ones from Germany among them.

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Email me at whatdoino (at) alaska (dot) net. [Taking the actual email address out of the code in hopes of cutting down the spam. Sorry for the inconvenience, but I'm spending way too much time deleting spam messages.][It did cut the span enormously.]

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About Me

I started this blog just to find out what the blogworld was all about. I figured I needed to actually blog, not just read other people's blogs, to understand how it works, and what ways it could be used. This is all experimental. A learning exercise for me. It's turning out to be a look at one person's (mine) life based in Anchorage. With occasional trips away.
UPDATE July 6, 2015: Here's a post that discusses my evasiveness in this profile - it's intentional.